I always thought it was pretty clear that Mysterious Saint Tail steals stuff by a combination of distraction, speed, and dexterity. [...]

I don't see any reason to complicate things by assuming she has ranged teleportation powers.

There are a number of direct observations that any Theory of Yuki needs to explain:

1) Hurling appliances: a teenage girl of Yuki's size and build isn't going to be a able to lift up a washing machine or refrigerator, let alone hurl it out a window. At the very least, "superhuman strength" needs to be added to the list of her traits above. (The next strip 1052 shows her "holding", one-handed, a washing machine or stove at an angle, presumably balanced on the window sill, while she herself is precariously balanced outside said window without anything like a firm foothold. That's pretty damn strong; basically we already need to postulate a magical ability here along the lines of "stuff stays where she wants it to". The only complexity the "teleportation" theory adds is to extend this to "stuff goes where she wants it to.")

2) Stealing a RAZ: If appliances are too heavy for a smallish teenage girl, then this takes that point to comic (ha ha) extremes. Yes, the RAZ is shown in subsequent strips to be quite compliant and helpful to Yuki, willing to follow her on a leash, and able to keep up with Largo's muffin cart. But 1061 shows Yuki planning to leave in panel 4 (her hair billowing out), and then having already returned in panel 5 (to talk to Largo). Essentially instantaneous. Assuming that a RAZ has the ability to travel at Yuki-level speeds (even claiming those speeds to be mundane and not "teleport"-related) would be a level of complexity even beyond that of the teleport theory itself. Did she drag it here using the "superhuman strength" suggested above? But now we're talking about not just enough strength to lift a RAZ, but to shove it nearly instantaneously across however many blocks away from the facility she and Largo had managed to travel. But speed's not really enough for that either; without some other magical ability ("structural integrity of the thing being stolen"?) she would just be ripping fistfuls of skin off the surface of the RAZ, or punching through it like a bullet through a cotton bale. So another ability added to the non-teleporting list, and another additional chunk of complexity needed by the non-teleporting theory.

(How did she get the RAZ through the cage bars and plate glass shown in 1060? Sure, with "superhuman strength" she could smash through them, and with enough "speed and dexterity" she could presumably pick all the locks and find all the "Open" buttons. Fred didn't bother showing any of that though; whatever happened, happened in the thin sliver between panels 4 and 5 of 1061, so any "non-teleporting" claims here are just as much conjecture as the "teleporting" ones, and not really any "simpler" in any way I can see.)

3) No meat on the hooks: My personal favorite, a point I made in the discussion thread for 1108 in fact. Note the similarity to RAZ's "instantaneous" appearance in 1061; one panel it's there, the next panel it's gone. No suggestion of having been accelerated away at whatever incredible speeds one cares to postulate; the hooks haven't all been pulled in a single physical direction as a result of mundane acceleration, they are just popping away in random directions as the tension in them (having been embedded in zombie-zilla's hide) suddenly vanishes. The hooks and barbs are both clean and undamaged. Super speed alone would leave chunks of zombie flesh torn off on the hooks. "Strucutral integrity" (which we already needed to assume that Yuki could shift the thing with "super speed" in the first place) isn't enough for this; that would break off all the hooks and barb heads, leaving them stuck in zombie-zilla's hide, and leaving a bunch of headless shafts visible in panel seven. So we would need to add yet another magical ability, "discrimination between the thing intended to be stolen and anything stuck or embedded in it, no matter how tightly".

At this point I really don't see a difference in complexity between the "teleporting" theory and the "non-teleporting" theory. The latter manages to avoid the ugly T-word, but at the cost of making a number of additional assumptions (perhaps not explicitly obvious ones but pretty much required to explain the things we've seen Yuki do), assumptions which are as a package just as physically nonsensical as "teleportation". I hate to sound like even more of a jerk by dragging this down into a semantic argument, but I am honestly curious: in what way is this package of assumptions needed for "non-teleportation" operationally different from "teleporting"? She can get objects from A to B faster than anyone can measure or observe, regardless of size, weight, or physical anchors. What properties does (magical, not technological; X-men's Nightcrawler, not River Song's vortex manipulator) "teleportation" have that make it a bad descriptor for what Yuki is doing?

One would be absolutely justified in being suspicious of teleportation here, I totally agree with that. Positive evidence is certainly very thin on the ground (par for the course in MegaTokyo ), and a lot of the above requires conjecture and a good deal of "filling in blanks". But to dismiss it out of hand as being an unjustifiably complex theory is IMO unfair unless one is careful about measuring the complexities in the alternative theories as well.

Last edited by darrin on Fri Oct 20, 2017 6:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I always thought it was pretty clear that Mysterious Saint Tail steals stuff by a combination of distraction, speed, and dexterity. I assumed Yuki's powers are basically the same, though she seems to depend a lot more on speed.

I don't see any reason to complicate things by assuming she has ranged teleportation powers.

I can imagine a girl not understanding that her speed is superpower level, especially if she compares herself to her mom and just thinks "I'm really fast when stealing things." I cannot however believe that a girl has teleportation powers and somehow doesn't realize that she is abnormal compared to others.

In the case of first stealing a full sized rent-A-Zilla from the rental facility and then 'stealing' it from the TPCD, it wouldn't be just her speed that would be superhuman. Eithere she's a magical girl and uses magic to do the things we have witnessed, or she's Supergirl.

May I point out that you are trying to apply physics to magical girls?

I hypothesize that Yuki is, on a deep level, aware that she is in a web comic and structures thereof. In particular, she knows about framing and gutters, and things like physical laws, object permanence, etc. only really apply within a frame and not to anything that is outside the frames.

Her stealing is conceptual. She steals the inertia from appliances and then gives it back. She stills a Zilla from the police and then gives it to her front yard. If she ever becomes consciously aware of what she is doing she could be truly terrifying. Imagine stealing the hearts from Megatokyo. She could lead an army or millions into battle with Miho's Horde.

I saw that strip, too. Ririko slipped back into "baby talk mode" when addressing Yuki at the end, too, so she's not really pissed at her, IMO.

Actually she didn't. Ririka left at the end of 1027. The nurse in the following couple of comics was Yuki's mom, Meimi. Ririka doesn't crop up again until about 1415 (https://megatokyo.com/strip/1415) when she talks to Yutaka (since they're the only two people in the room) about how she had a "soooo~ awful-waffle" day. But she hasn't spoken to Yuki again until this strip.

I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. I was referring to the end of the current strip, not 1027. She says"widdle bwue car".

Sorry. Yes, the fact that she's not screaming at Yuki is evidence that she's not that mad. Plus, being a MG probably has a "learning curve" and surely Ririka did her share of damage when she was starting out. She may even have inflicted a few concussions, broken ribs and what-have-you.

There are a number of direct observations that any Theory of Yuki needs to explain:

1) Hurling appliances: a teenage girl of Yuki's size and build isn't going to be a able to lift up a washing machine or refrigerator, let alone hurl it out a window. At the very least, "superhuman strength" needs to be added to the list of her traits above. (The next strip 1052 shows her "holding", one-handed, a washing machine or stove at an angle, presumably balanced on the window sill, while she herself is precariously balanced outside said window without anything like a firm foothold. That's pretty damn strong; basically we already need to postulate a magical ability here along the lines of "stuff stays where she wants it to". The only complexity the "teleportation" theory adds is to extend this to "stuff goes where she wants it to.") . . .

I suspect the term you're thinking of is "tactile telekinesis." It involves being able to levitate objects you're touching/holding. That means physical strength isn't required.

https://megatokyo.com/strip/1193 I also think her brother is a tad faster then her mother thinks. Somehow I doubt that he happened to have a pre filled whoopy cushion in arms reach.

Ha, awesome. Back in the discussion thread for 1193 and neighboring strips, folks like me, who said the scene made a lot more sense if it was Yuuji tossing bits of food on her chair, were roundly dismissed as nutters. (The Yuuji side made up, oh, about 30% of debaters, the other 70% insisting it was Meimi doing some unspecified nonsense for some never specified reason.) Glad to see that with the passage of time folks are seeing Yuuji as the obvious culprit.

There are a number of direct observations that any Theory of Yuki needs to explain:

1) Hurling appliances: a teenage girl of Yuki's size and build isn't going to be a able to lift up a washing machine or refrigerator, let alone hurl it out a window. At the very least, "superhuman strength" needs to be added to the list of her traits above. (The next strip 1052 shows her "holding", one-handed, a washing machine or stove at an angle, presumably balanced on the window sill, while she herself is precariously balanced outside said window without anything like a firm foothold. That's pretty damn strong; basically we already need to postulate a magical ability here along the lines of "stuff stays where she wants it to". The only complexity the "teleportation" theory adds is to extend this to "stuff goes where she wants it to.") . . .

I suspect the term you're thinking of is "tactile telekinesis." It involves being able to levitate objects you're touching/holding. That means physical strength isn't required.

Which is the actual basis for DC superfamily's super strength. It would be impossible to pick up a building by one corner of the foundation, the material just wouldn't support it and simply break off.

Who needs to worry about physics when they have magic. Inertia and mass, bah! Grab a bit of building, the whole thing is yours. The simple easy logical; she's a Magical Girl. Yuki uses magic to do things. Whether that's to nullify gravity, remove time and space, create channels wherever, whatever magic does or how it does it. She teleports things to and from hither and yon without having to worry about how it works because it just does. Some say the simplest answer often is likely true, and in this case it's short, elegant and fits.

Okay, well, let me at least give full credit for not still claiming that it was "glue", which quickly became the prevailing Meimi theory in those threads at the time (supplanting the already nutty idea that she would be the one to play such a sibling-style prank with food in the first place). I almost got pissed off at the sight of so many otherwise sensible folks pushing theories of Meimi that, as Ray Kremer put it, you'd pretty much have to be raised by feral crack whores to consider remotely plausible. But it was hilarious when at the end of the scene, when Yuki vanished off into the night without, of course, any kind of a chair glued to her ass, not one single person stepped up and said, "Huh, guess it wasn't glue after all, whoops." Would have been a good opportunity to try questioning other aspects of the idea that Meimi was the one childishly pranking her own daughter.

Of course the above is complete bullshit, and I really hate myself when I go and get caught up in spouting stupid bullshit for no good reason, so I almost didn't reply at all. Except, for a change, there is finally a tiny bit of new evidence on an old question:

Ririka, in 1497, wrote:...your Mama was never really all that magical.... I don't think she ever set off one of those alarms.

Back in the debate at the time, the points that a sibling-style prank would only have been played by Yuuji were dismissed as circumstantial; the main argument was that Yuuji is obviously non-magical, and that Meimi is Magical Mom, and thus only she had the necessary super-speed to get the glue (since it was obviously glue ) on Yuki's chair.

Except now it's been established, by someone whose word we don't currently have any solid reason to question, that Meimi apparently wasn't particularly magical after all, hence no super-speed. That raises the question of how she held her own against Junpei; I certainly assumed at the time she had "magical" jumping abilities in similar vein to Yuki's (and Miho's) abilities to hop up onto telephone poles. But now it looks like either Ririka is lying about this, which would be odd, or else Meimi must have managed to train herself physically in some fashion roughly similar to what ninjas like Junpei go through.

Getting back to the dinner, this leaves us with the food being tossed (apparently at super-speed) on Yuki's chair either by Meimi, who it now appears is just as incapable of that as Yuuji was originally thought to be; or the annoying brother, whose "oh hey, look how innocent I am, that's pretty damn innocent wouldn't you say? Yeah I am all about the innocent, that's me" mug could only be believed by someone never exposed to a teenager in their life, and whose abilities are (aside from this food-tossing hint itself) completely unknown. (There's certainly no evidence against him having such abilities, which ordinarily wouldn't count for much; but Ririka's comment is sufficient evidence to start shifting the prior probabilities in Yuuji's direction.)

Of course it will be Fred knows how long before we even see Yuuji again. Guess I better hunker down for another eight years of waiting for another tantalizing dab of evidence.

Last edited by darrin on Mon Oct 30, 2017 7:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If only we knew if Ririka was an all-around multi-faceted reliable narrator objectively stating an actual truth here.

Maybe Meimi wasn't and isn't all that magical, or maybe Ririka only thinks that. Ririka might be uninformed. Crazy, lying, kidding or speaking in a rhetorical non-literal sense. Just as if Meimi's ditzy deal is at all real. Or just a not quite trustworthy act and front.

If all of a sudden a car shrinks to thimble size and jumps in your purse beyond your rational lucid conscious knowledge, it's not stealing, and it's not magic. At least not in the sense of willfully taking things that are not yours or in the sense of casting a spell to shrink a RAZ or to turn a zombie one into a bipedal humaniform non-zombie one.

It could be Ririka is truthful and correct, but simply doesn't consider being able to move really fast and able to move really big things really fast as magic.